With the division of duties in a complex project, such as the creation of a new product, the administration of the project becomes increasingly complicated and difficult. Moreover, the division of the task between various locations, potentially located in different places, or even various countries located on different continents. For example, it has become increasingly common to outsource various tasks in a project for various economic reasons, including costs, availability of appropriately skilled and trained labor, availability of natural resources, the availability of needed infrastructure and equipment, etc.
Tracking completion of tasks distributed among various locations is a difficult process since each of the locations may have different record keeping and management styles. Furthermore, existing tracking solutions do not assist an organization in defining tasks, distributing the tasks, monitoring the status of the tasks to identify any lagging tasks, and proposing courses of action to address the lagging tasks. Furthermore, none of the existing solution allows an organization to measure the compliance of the various tasks in a meaningful way, such as the ability to accurately comparing the ability to punctually complete different types of tasks at different locations by different personnel at each of the location. In this way, an organization may determine, for example, that certain tasks should not be assigned to certain locations or certain personnel.
This type of analysis further allows an organization to needed remedial actions to address any problems in completion of tasks, such as to better allocate resources or to better schedule performance of the tasks.
Furthermore, project often entails various tasks that, although necessary, may not be expressly listed in a contract. For example, project may have various overriding legal, regulatory, and other overriding business requirements (e.g., satisfaction of customer expectations from prior contracts). Suppose, for example, a customer contracts to have company create a software application, and that company subcontracts various third parties to complete aspects of the software application. Aside from express desires of the client, the company may need to identify and ensure that various other implied tasks are completed. For example, the software may need to comply with various government regulations and industry standards that do not exist in the location of the third-party. Thus, company will need to identify, instruct and track completion of the various government regulations and industry standards by the third party.
Similarly, other implied duties may exist in a project. For example, a customer may expect certain actions based upon prior transactions. A third party would not know of these implied duties however, since it may never have dealt with
Currently, no technology exists to perform the function of identifying and assigning implied tasks, and instead, projects are managed using trained people. However, this leads to an inherent risk that one or more of the government regulations and industry standards are not met, particularly, as government regulations and industry standards vary in different locations and are in constant flux. Conversely, management may respond to this problem by undertaking potentially unnecessary tasks to minimize the risk of failing to compliance with contract terms and government regulations and industry standards but increasing project costs.
Furthermore, it is difficult to track and monitor completion of the implied tasks since, as described above, it is often difficult to even identify the implied tasks.